YouTube introduces automatic captions for the disabled

Google Inc. announced today that it is using speech recognition technology to create automatic captions for certain videos on YouTube, helping the deaf and hearing impaired to access a rapidly growing form of online content.

The Mountain View search company is employing the same technology that allows it to transcribe voice messages into text on its Google Voice call forwarding service. In this case, the text is embedded within the video like standard captions.

Anyone who’s used Google Voice can tell you the resulting transcription isn’t always perfect — and sometimes it’s hilariously off. But the company said that under ideal circumstances, the technology gets four out of every five words correct, enough to provide a good sense of what’s being said.

Challenges to automatic transcription today include things like background noise, music and strong accents in videos — as well as the fact that, so far, the service only works for English. But the technology is improving rapidly and the company hopes to be able to overcome those limitations eventually.

“My hope is that some day, every video everywhere will be captioned,” said Ken Harrenstein, a deaf software engineer at Google who helped design the feature, through a translator.

For the initial launch, the so called auto-caps program is limited to a handful of YouTube content partners, including UC Berkeley, Stanford, MIT, Yale, UCLA, Duke, UCTV, Columbia, PBS, National Geographic, Demand Media and UNSW.